Archive for ‘Steve Jobs’

Creative agency Jess3 has collaborated with Forbes to produce a 80 page graphic novel of Steve Jobs when he was fired from Apple. The book goes in detail about the relationship of Jobs with the Zen Buddhist priest Kobun Chino Otagawa, who was a maverick himself. It focuses on Jobs’ intensive study with Kobun and the impact it had on Steve’s career and design philosophy. The book explores how Jobs’ might have honed his design aesthetic via Eastern religion to identify only what he needs and leave the rest behind. It sounds to me as an interesting read!

Click on the slide show below for a few sample pages & you can buy the novel here.

On HTC’s introduction of an Android phone that boasted much of the popular features of the iPhone, the book says that Steve called it a “grand theft”

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

Jobs used an expletive to describe Android and Google Docs, Google’s Internet-based word processing program. In a subsequent meeting with Schmidt at a Palo Alto, Calif., cafe, Jobs told Schmidt that he wasn’t interested in settling the lawsuit, the book says.

“I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.”

The biography also hints a new product that Apple may have in the pipeline – an integrated HDTV

“‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.'”

He called Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, his “spiritual partner” at Apple. He told Isaacson that Ive had “more operation power” at Apple than anyone besides Jobs himself — that there’s no one at the company who can tell Ive what to do. That, says Jobs, is “the way I set it up.”

Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President for Industrial Design, has been at Apple for nearly 20 years and is responsible for the iconic product designs that the company has released.

The biography has been having record pre-orders. If you haven’t yet ordered the best Steve Jobs memorabilia, then do so now 🙂 You can order it here.

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The hot cloud storage start-up turned down Apple’s offer for $800 M in 2009 and now Drop Box has a $4 Billion valuation. CEO and founder Drew Houston talks to Forbes – whose cover DropBox will grace – about his meeting with Steve Jobs and how he did not want to sell the company to anyone, even to Apple.

Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market. “He said we were a feature, not a product,” says Houston.

Now with Apple’s own iCloud available to all the Apple users for free, Dropbox has a big hurdle to pass. Other competitors are Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Box.net, iDrive and YouSendIt.

He’s protecting his flank against Google via a new deal with phonemaker HTC, which will make Dropbox the default cloud storage option on every one of its Android phones. Deals with six other phone firms are almost inked; PC and television makers are next.

Drop Box has simplicity, ease of use and popularity going for it, but can the David fend off the Goliaths who are investing heavily on cloud storage? Will DropBox survive? Forbes has a great read on the company. Check it out.

We are talking serious to Apple and Steve Jobs fanboys here. Macheads is a documentary shot by Kobi Kelly with Guy Kawasaki and Galen Brandt. It does an in-depth examination about what makes Apple products a cultural phenomenon and what makes fanboys so loyal to Steve Jobs. You can watch it on Snagfilms for free or order it on Amazon to own a copy of Macheads.

Pirates of Silicon Valley, the 1999 Emmy nominated telefilm is a great watch for anyone not familiar with the early days of Steve and Apple Inc. Noah Wyle plays Steve Jobs, Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates and Joey Slotnick as Steve Wozniak. It’s a dramatic retelling of the life of the tech entrepreneurs Jobs, Wozniak and Bill Gates from their college days to the launch of the Macintosh and MS-DOS. If you missed tonight’s airing on TNT at 10 pm CST, you can buy it on Amazon. Check out the trailer below.

Apple has an uphill task ahead. A task to deliver products as Steve did and a task to think like Steve did. LATimes reports a heavily guarded project within the Apple campus. It is an executive training program called the Apple University to engrain Jobs’ DNA (not literally) in the company’s executives. In other words, Steve planned to keep the company rolling and to continue his Apple legacy.

It is said that Steve identified things that are responsible for Apple’s innovation and success – accountability, attention to detail, perfectionism, simplicity and secrecy. He oversaw the creation of courses that demonstrate how to translate those principles into business practices. Jobs’s previous company, Pixar also has a similar university model.

One of Apple’s employees said, “Steve was looking to his legacy. The idea was to take what is unique about Apple and create a forum that can impart that DNA to future generations of Apple employees,” said a former Apple executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his relationship with the company. “No other company has a university charged with probing so deeply into the roots of what makes the company so successful.”

Jobs is said to have recruited the dean of Yale Business School to run it along with other business professors and Harvard veterans to prepare employees for Stevehood.